Matt Connolly's Blog
my brain dumps here…
Telstra Bigpond Cable crappy Netgear Router part 7
In my last post, I wrote that after too many unsuccessful calls to Bigpond technical support to replace my crappy Netgear CGD24N cable modem, I spoke with someone in sales who said they would send me a replacement modem and that it would be a Thomson cable modem. Well the modem arrived in the mail today, and guess what? They sent me another Netgear CGD24N. Fools.
Enough is enough. I went to my local computer store and bought a Linksys wireless router, disabled NAT on the CGD24N (effectively disabling all of its router functions and using it just as a modem), and connected the Linksys router. Boom. Fast, snappy perfect internet.
It just goes to show that the router part of the CGD24N is total rubbish.
I’ve been on the phone to Telstra Bigpond about a dozen times now, have had a field technician check the line 3 times (it’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with the line) and replace the modem with the same model 3 times (it’s still rubbish) and have no solution. Except for me to spend more money on another piece of gear to do the job of the router that Telstra provided.
Now that I have a perfectly working connection, my motivation to speak to Telstra call centres that can’t do anything about this problem is massively reduced.
However, I think other potential customers should know about these issues. And likewise, so does the TIO.
I feel your pain.
I have had the exact same issues with the crap netgear modem supplied.
(Big assumption HERE) in the past I have had similar issues with adsl based netgear modem routers. In fact the exact same issue. Some were later resolved with firmware updated that enabled options to disable log on port forwarding. Seems the issue was that the internal memory was filled up and caused the router to crash. This is why it required more frequent restarts when a lot more data is transferee (peer to peer for example) unfortunately one cannot flash the cable router with 3rd party firmware. The symptoms I describe on the adsl routers seems to be the same as what is happening on this cable router.
After reading your post I pulled out my belkin router (which has an option for telstra cable connection, disabled Nat on the telstra router, connected port 1 on the telstra router to the modem port on the Belkin, and I have not had one dropout for over a week.